Life in progress

Tag Archives: readers

Stephanie has posted a list of 100 books – how many have you read? I only have 31 1/2 under my belt – I didn’t finish the Narnia series. So many here I want to read and reread!
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So I’ve been tinkering with Pinterest lately – that’s what happens when you’re on sick leave and can’t concentrate long enough to do anything really productive – and I found a few lists of 100 books one should read before they die.
I picked this one list just because it doesn’t separate series into multiple books (as in Harry Potter series has one spot instead of HP 1, HP 2…); I merely switched CS Lewis’s The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (included in The Chronicles of Narnia) for The Hunger Games since the latter was on every other list I found and Shakespeare’s Hamlet (obviously included in Complete works) for The Alchemist by Paolo Coelho for the same reason.
Since this list is apparently dating back to 2003 it’s certainly missing some good books from the past decade but well… I need to stop at one point.

My novelette, All Good Stories is on sale today! It’s a romantic comedy, complete with pirates, a parrot, and a Viking. What could possibly go wrong? Lighthearted and fun, it’s perfect to enjoy over a lunchtime or two. It’s available for the low cost of 99¢, or the equivalent in whichever country you live, on both Amazon for Kindle here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01JQWMQAE

The Kobo site has a preview of the book. I plan to figure out how to set one up on Amazon soon. In the meantime, here are the first two chapters:

Aarin, The Topless Pirate

Jupiter bounded into my book store with an extraordinary spring in her step.

“I finished it!” she proclaimed, beaming much like the ray of sunshine that fell upon the counter every fair morning at this time of year.

“Finished what?” I asked. As if I didn’t know. She’d spent months bemoaning the grueling process of editing her novel.

“Stop it, Xav.” Jupiter had a peculiar way of shortening my name when she was annoyed at me. Her eyes narrowed and her lip lifted crookedly at the ‘V’ as she elongated it. She was very cute when she did it, which made me want to annoy her all the more.

“Wait, let me guess. Your novel?” I teased.

“YES!”

I wished, not for the first time, as she bounced up and down in her spring jacket that we were more than just friends.

“Does that mean you’re finally going to share it with me?” Leaning forward on the counter, I rested my chin in my hand to affect nonchalance. Deep down, I was as excited as she was.

“Of course I’ll let you read it.” She dug through the suitcase she called a purse. After a moment, she pulled out a bound stack of papers. “Aarin, The Topless Pirate,” she announced as she plopped it down in front of me.

“Sounds promising.” I glanced at the title page, which stated only the title, then back to my best friend. “What’s it about?”

“It’s um… It’s about a pirate who goes to sea.”

“And is the pirate topless?” I sat up straight. Visions volleyed around in my mind of breasts bared to the slightly chilled ocean breeze.

She smiled wickedly. “You’ll have to read it to find out.”

I picked up the manuscript and slid it onto the shelf behind the counter. “I’ll read it later.”

She stared, wide-eyed. “You’re not serious.”

“It doesn’t sound that interesting. It can wait.”

“But…” She didn’t look as though she was going to cry, exactly, but the distress on her face was enough to make me waver.

“Sell it to me,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“Make me want to read it. Tell me what it’s about.”

“It’s about a pirate. A topless pirate. Who goes to sea.”

“…and?”

“And what? Isn’t that enough?”

“Is there sex? Is there a sunburn involved?”

“Fine! Don’t read it then.” She turned sharply and stalked out of the store.

Feeling bad about my little April Fool’s Day joke, I watched until she disappeared around the corner before I pulled the manuscript back out. I turned back the title page fully expecting to be properly titillated, only to find a photocopied picture of a crusty old pirate with his back facing the camera. He wore nothing but a three-cornered hat.

That we share the same sense of humor makes it no wonder Jupiter and I have been best friends since elementary school.

Bob The Blogger

Bob was a novelist. He was also a blogger. To round out the combo, to make it a trio (because Bob adored the number three), he referred to himself as a Serial Alliterator, which meant he loved alliterations. His blog profile sported a selfie of a previously pencil-thin Bob in the bathroom mirror, wearing nothing but a wicked grin. Though he stated in his profile that he loved the outdoors, since his foray into blogging he had seldom seen the sun. Secretly, he called himself Blob the Blogger.

Today, Bob is excited because yesterday he met Jupiter online. They met on Bob’s blog after Bob blogged about writing a novel. He and Jupiter spent three hours commenting back and forth. Jupiter was single, and she was writing a novel as well.

Tomorrow, if he wasn’t too tired from using the treadmill, Bob planned to write Jupiter three poems. His poems would employ many uses of alliteration; they would contain the letter ‘J’ as often as Bob could manage. They would not contain the first letter of Jupiter’s best friend’s name. As far as Bob was concerned, he needed no excuse to leave the letter ‘X’ out of Jupiter’s joyous poetry. No justification at all.

Recently, we here at LitWorldInterviews.com conducted a survey, “Why do you put a book down?” and through the assistance of the writing community we had a very nice response. Now it’s time to share what we found.

First, I want to say why the survey was conducted. We wanted to help writers by giving them the information they most need. If a reader takes the time to check out your book and don’t like it, they are unlikely to give you a second chance with your next work. First impressions mean a lot.

86.30% of those responding were Female, thus leaving the remaining 13.70% Male. Considering the majority of those reading novels are Female, although not quite this extreme, I’m comfortable with sharing what we found.

There were 34 sub-categories as a result of the survey. Those results were then placed into 5 main categories: Writing, Editing, Proofreading, Taste, and…

First up, it’s time for a happy dance! My Facebook author page hit 100 followers today! If you’re not already following me, I’d appreciate it if you’d contribute to my new goal of 200? 😀 Here’s the link: https://www.facebook.com/lindaghill.fiction?ref=hl

In other news, I decided to go ahead and make another WordPress site. I took the advice of several of my commenters on the previous post and downloaded Chrome so I can keep the two identities open at once. Finding followers is going slow, but it’s infinitely better than at Blogger, where I’ve started writing a parody of sorts. It’s enjoyable for the moment, but with no one reading it, it’s going to get boring. I’m sure I’ll eventually post it here at WP – where it won’t be boring, natch.

So, my new persona. The name came to me as sometimes names do and you just know they’re right; no rhyme nor reason for it. My profile picture is a selfie I took of the back of my neck… which was fun with my sore shoulder. Why a picture of the back of my neck? You’ll see when you get there. I’ve created a twitter account to go along with the blog, just for the hell of it. As it says on the little twitter description of me, “Beware: utters expletives without warning” – there will be more swearing over on my new blog than there is here. To give an example, I’m thinking about doing A-Z April over there with the theme, “A-Z imaginative cusses.” Because I can.

Anyhow, I plan to have fun over there. My address is https://isabellamorgan.wordpress.com/ and my twitter is @izzymorganblog. This may be the only link to the new blog here at Life in Progress (except for the edit I plan to do on my previous post), though I might advertise it once a year as an anniversary thing. There won’t be any links over there to this one. I just want to keep the two separate, but if you comment over there, don’t be afraid to call me Linda. I’m not going to advertise, but I’m not uptight about keeping the two secret from one another. It’s really just a way to keep this blog more professional while having the freedom to write whatever I want, whenever I want.

So what other news is there? Oh! A cat,

Luka

or two.

Casper

What random post would be complete without cats? These two are boarding with the troll (aka my eldest son) in my basement. They came upstairs for a visit so I thought I’d shoot a few piccies.

Okay, so you have a WordPress site of your own and your site has followers. When you started out, you got your first few notifications that someone had hitched their wagon to your blog and you thought, “Great! I have someone reading what I write!” But then as time went by, you realized that maybe they weren’t reading after all.

Fast forward to where you are now. You have tens if not thousands of followers. How many of those numbers do you figure actually visit your blog?

What brought this up in the first place was the municipal elections we had yesterday across the province of Ontario. Voter turnout at most elections is far below the numbers of of eligible voters. The difference between running for election and blogging is the people running for election are putting out money to advertise themselves. At least we bloggers don’t need to go to that length to have our sites viewed. But I digress.

From what I’ve gathered over the last twenty-one months of blogging, it seems that any of us are, at any given time, being visited by 10%-20% of our followers. The 20% is if you’re either very lucky or if all of your followers are friends and family.

I have just over 2,100 blog followers at the moment. I would estimate that over the course of my blogging career, I’ve had between 10-15% of my numbers actually reading my site on a daily basis. Which means that people have come and gone, and some have come back again, but on an average day I have around that many regular followers, not including those who show up once and I never see again. My regular followers don’t visit every day, but I know they’re out there by our interactions. On my fiction blog it’s even less – I have over 600 followers and would guess there only around 20 or 30 people who regularly read. That’s only about 3-5%

I’m far more frustrated with my 3-5%, obviously, than with my 10-15%, but as I said, at least it doesn’t cost me anything but the time I put into writing.

If you had to guess just going by feel and judging by the number of followers you chat with in a day, how many of your followers are reading you?